necropolis, baby
by orpheus-under-starlight
Summary: Legend has it that Dromund Kaas is a world of the dead. In search of an ancient relic that could help the Resistance, Rey ventures to the dead planet with an unlikely ally in tow... but Kylo Ren can't seem to leave well enough alone, and they're not the only beings on the planet. Something elusive haunts their every step. Luckily, Rey's ally is willing to play guide. For a price.
1. Chapter 1

Florrum is a world of dry dust and ancient plateaus.

Rey has never quite gotten used to the way every horizon in the galaxy takes on a different shape. Jakku had the Carbon Ridge and a thousand others just like it; Takodana had forested mountains and waterfalls, a wide green span of possibility. D'Qar is misty, even now, humid at all times of the year, and she had spent a happy few hours wandering near the Resistance base, sketching the local wildlife. Each planet had only been the beginning of a path that would take her on a journey spanning from one tip of known space to the other, and both of the ones with green on them felt wondrous. As if she would never experience anything quite like it again.

This dust ball, though, doesn't inspire the same sense of awe.

"Just like old times," she tells herself as she fishes ration packs out of a drawer in her ship's tiny kitchen unit. It's not quite true—she never had anything so advanced as a kitchen unit before—but it's true enough. It has all the familiar elements: tasteless, nameless matter, providing only nutrition; her tassels, long, brushing against her calves with every movement; the sight of a desert lit under fading light, a sun crowning the planet's rim.

A dying star.

There are thousands of them out there. As night falls on Florrum, Rey can't help but clamber up the side of her ship and perch on top, her eyes watching the sky. Even as she lifts her comm to her mouth to record a message for General Organa, the majesty of the night captures her attention.

It feels... lonely. Like the darkness of high noon in a Star Destroyer, swinging across the vast expanse of the abyss with only a cable to cling to, your breath the only living sound in all the space.

"I'm en route to Dromund Kaas, General," she says to the comm. The message will be encoded and sent several star systems away. Where, exactly, she doesn't know—it's for both the Resistance's safety and hers should her connection to Kylo Ren spring up again, a preventative measure Leia came up with for both their sakes. "So far the trip has been smooth. Whether or not the relics are still there is anyone's guess, but all the spacers seem to agree that the planet is haunted. I'll report back in when I've learnt more. May the Force be with you."

There are clouds, here on Florrum. Jakku only clouded over when the X'us'Riia was imminent. But here, the clouds shift and broil—they're almost like angry wanderers, lost somewhere near the atmosphere, left behind long ago. Their movement shutters the heavens, bathes her in the thin light of dusk.

Planet upon planet, star upon star, celestial body upon celestial body. Every single one is within her reach now. Nothing is beyond her means when she's with the Resistance, accompanying them on their travels, undertaking their missions and fighting in their war—a war she's only barely had time to process.

Rey makes a quiet noise in the back of her throat, hand drifting to her shoulder. Covering the wound there had only served to remind her of its presence. Finn had asked about it the first moment they had to themselves, before Rose woke, and she'd stammered something about the Supremacy and falling shrapnel, she'd tried to infiltrate, to discover if there had been any hidden knowledge the First Order was secreting away about the Jedi—

"You're incredible with the Force, Rey," Finn told her, something too knowing in his eyes for her liking, "but you're a terrible liar."

"I don't know what you mean," she snipped back.

Finn, to his credit, wasn't terribly unsettled. "I don't know what happened up there, Rey. Won't ask unless you want me to. We all have our secrets—you know mine. Some of them. Whatever happened, your arm..." Reaching for just under her elbow, pausing and gesturing at her upper arm instead, he mimed grasping for his other hand. "It looks almost deliberate, to me. Like someone... well. Did anything happen?"

What he really meant, with the blue of hyperspace flickering across their faces and the prospect of a very long trip ahead of them, was _who did this to you?_

_Kylo Ren,_ she thought, _in a way, _but the name stung too much. Then: _Ben Solo._ Even further: _A man who was once a boy, whose future I saw some kind of shard of. Was I wrong, Finn?_

But even if she'd been in a time and place where admitting that was safe, she never would have spoken the words out loud. She shrugged instead. Finn seemed disappointed, but true to his word, he let it pass. Instead Rey learned all about the cute Resistance mechanic that saved his life.

She's happy for him. Really.

What she is _not _happy about is the trespasser skulking about near her ship. She can't hear any movement, and the terrain around here is as still as a desert planet can get, but she can sense whoever it is. Since Luke's "instruction", she's grown used to practicing increasing her awareness of the Force whenever she has the opportunity. What that has yielded for her now is the knowledge that they are somewhere behind and to the left of her, which also just so happens to be where the loading ramp to her grubby, ancient YKL-37R Nova Courier is located.

Rey keeps her posture as loose and fluid as she can. Her staff, habitually slung across her back, sits at an odd angle against the knobs of her spine. The old 'saber hangs at her hip. This isn't easy, it never is, but she has honed the art that is patience.

You don't survive long in the desert without learning when to pick your moment.

She hears footsteps, light and faint. They pause. Then, with the memory of the X'us'riia in her bones and the fading light on her face, Rey summons her strength and leaps back, flipping in the air and landing behind her visitor, staff in hand and set against their neck.

"What do you want," she demands more than she asks. It's somewhere between flat and openly threatening; the Rey that had learned not to trust strangers is lingering in this place.

The man she's threatening has the gall to chuckle. To _laugh!_ "I see, I see," he says pleasantly, as if being held captive with a weapon near his cranium is a run-of-the-mill occurrence. "So this is what the Jedi have to offer these days, eh? A scrappy desert rat!"

Rey grits her teeth. "What," she says again, "do you _want?"_

"Using force, but not the Force," he muses. "Fallen on hard times, have we now?"

"Give me one reason why I ought not knock you out and toss you off this cliff," she growls, pressing her staff against his throat.

He coughs. "Well. I think you'll be needing the code if you'll want to get that tracker off your ship."

"Or I could just knock it off. I've got practice."

"Not these trackers, little Jedi. They have advanced technology these days—you'll be hard-pressed to find anything with more suction power than one of these!"

With a scowl, she divests him of his two visible blasters and steps back. There's no good reason to believe a pirate, which he so clearly is, but at least he'll be forced to waste time going for a different weapon if he tries anything. "Fine, then. Clearly you've done this for a reason. What are you after?"

"Some manners would be nice, for one. Don't you Jedi have a, ah, what do you call it..." He scratches his chin in thought. "A code of etiquette?"

"Give me your name and I'll give you mine," she grumps. Whoever this man is, she's only going to regard him as a karking nuisance.

He tilts his hat in a mocking gesture of propriety. "Hondo Ohnaka. At my service... and no one else's!"

"Lovely," Rey deadpans. "I'm Rey. I've asked multiple times what your business is here and I'm not about to ask again."

"Ah, Rey. I have a business proposition for you. You are a Jedi, I am a pirate. We're the only two types of people in the world that don't fear places like Dromund Kaas, and I have it on good authority that relics are going for a pretty credit in certain markets right now. Something about old things waking after a long sleep... and a new Jedi walking this galaxy. One with the power to destroy men long believed to be untouchable." He paces in a small circle, a thoughtful moue planted on his face, then turns to her with his arms spread wide. "Why, just imagine the possibilities! If we were to team up, for instance, and take on a temple or two on Dromund Kaas, you might just find your relic... and I may just find a fine fortune."

She considers this for a long moment, her jaw set and her lips thin with displeasure. It would be a far easier task to take the man down and leave him for those nasty-looking raptors she's spotted in the distance, but Hondo clearly knows exactly what a Jedi is—well enough to insult her capabilities as one—and pirates are a disgustingly predictable lot, in the sense that the only thing you can trust them with is that they can't be trusted in the first place.

Rey knows a thing or two about working with brigands that you absolutely do not trust under any circumstance. One of the only things that stands out the way her parents leaving had is the sight of Devi and Strunk taking off with the 690 long freighter she'd painstakingly pieced back together on that flimsy promise of funds and camaraderie.

(Not that she had much trusted the idea of camaraderie from two known fools in the first place. Maybe she had _wanted_ it—but wanting is different from trusting, and Rey is a fool as well, but not fool enough to keep deceiving herself about the deep ache in her bones, in the base of her spine. It goes beyond want. And that, she knows, is perhaps the most dangerous thing she has had to reckon with in all her twenty standard years.)

"...Fine." She turns abruptly and stalks over to the loading ramp, the unwelcome memory further darkening a mood that hadn't had much hope of turning lighter in the first place.

Hondo turns and catches up to her with a jaunty step. For a pirate, he certainly seems fond of accessories that jangle and bounce and alert anyone within a twenty-meter span of his position. "We have a deal, then!"

"We might have a deal, but I have just been through a twenty-standard hour flight and I am going to rest," Rey snaps, whirling to face him with her feet on the loading ramp. "You stay outside. We'll leave in the morning."

He holds his hands up, a placating gesture that accomplishes about nil. "Worry not, my dear Jedi, I understand. We'll want to be in fine form, won't we?"

"Don't touch my ship or make any other modifications. I _will_ know."

She slams the button to close the ramp and tries not to reflect on how the more things change, the more some things stay the same.


	2. Chapter 2

The moment they drop out of hyperspace near Dromund Kaas, Rey finds herself gobsmacked by a wave of Darkness—but not Darkness like the kind she's come to know, that wild, active energy unfettered by chaos and exultant in suffering, the sort that masks the truth of Kylo Ren.

Kylo Ren, who takes no pleasure in suffering even as he inflicts it. Ben Solo, who had looked into the depths of her and had only compassion.

Well. Compassion and... not an unfair amount of exasperation, she admits, if only to herself.

But that openness between them has been shuttered, by mutual unspoken agreement. There is too much at risk, they rip each other open raw, they're both still smarting after—after Crait.

At any rate, the Darkness present here is not so much wild as it is watchful. Rey tries not to stretch out beyond what is necessary. She gets a sense that it is waiting for her, waiting to see what she will do, and for a moment the lumbering consciousness probing at her edges pauses and seems to consider her.

Then it withdraws.

She swallows and minds her piloting with just a little bit more care than before.

"There," Hondo says, pointing out the viewport at a dark blot visible on the planetary surface. "I happen to know of a landing port deep in that city."

"It's a city? Doesn't look like much." Rey sets the coordinates in the navcomp nonetheless.

Hondo snorts. He leans back in his chair, arms crossed behind his head, hands cushioning his skull, and she will acknowledge this much: he knows about personal hygiene. Perhaps it's knowledge that only the very old can retain. Lor San Tekka over in Tuanal had been very put-together, too. "Not so much now, no? Its power grid has been destroyed for hundreds of generations. Imagine it lit up when we arrive, and it may look a little more impressive, eh?"

"How far back does this city go?" she asks, glancing at him.

"Who can say?" He shrugs. "Maybe some fancy scholar. I wouldn't know—I've got better things to do, like divest it of its treasures. Best to put the things to use! And why not _my_ use? All of that, just sitting there... quite a shame. Quuiiite a shame."

Rey grunts in vague acknowledgment and begins to steer the ship downward. He sneaks a look at her through those worn goggles of his, but if he's waiting for condemnation, he'll be waiting a long, long while.

Jakku might be behind her, but scavenging never will be.

* * *

"You've been here before?"

"Once or twice," Hondo says. He's peering out the viewport. The landing platform he'd directed them to is on the outskirts of this ruined city, but even with the noonday sun high in the sky, the place feels dark and unwelcoming. It's in the very bones of the architecture—high-flying, aquiline at the very top of most every building, built all in clean lines and sharp angles. If she didn't know better, it would almost be like an Imperial ruin. Those had been cold the way this city is.

Rey runs through various post-flight checks and considers this. "I sense something here. Don't get eaten."

"Worried, my dear?"

"I'm not your dear," she says bluntly, flicking the last set of switches needed to power the ship down. "I am a Jedi." Whether or not she knows exactly what that means. "It's in your best interests to listen to me about the Force."

Hondo looks at her for a second—really looks at her, weighing, measuring—and then he laughs. "A Jedi? You? Maybe so. But I remember them, and you are not so, hm... dignified. The ability to wield that lightsaber of yours does not a Jedi make, Rey."

"You... _remember_ them? Pardon?" Putting aside what Hondo thinks constitutes a Jedi, the fact that he's stayed alive long enough to have known the Jedi automatically takes him up a notch in her estimation.

If he's telling the truth.

Contrary to his thus-far pattern of dastardly and gregarious nonchalance, he actually quiets for a moment. "Huh," he muses. "I suppose I do. You could say that."

Well, she supposes, it's hard to fake the kind of glassiness that steals onto his expression as he considers something within the confines of his own mind.

"What were they like?"

"Now that, little Jedi, is information you'll need to pay for."

Rey glowers, more grateful than ever that she'd left the sacred Jedi texts in the care of Finn and Rose for the duration of this mission.

* * *

The city looms above their heads as they wander off the ship and into the spaceport. With an uneasy look at the dark sky above them, Rey wants to breathe in and center herself—but Hondo is just as shrewd as she is, probably far moreso and he's surely waiting for her to display a sign of weakness. She might be his ticket out of here. She may be a subject of amusement to him, for reasons she doesn't entirely understand. The trouble is that if you give someone enough incentive, by, say, sending a signal that you're not as on top of things as you might like to be, it makes you a target.

Rey nearly stops short at that. Thoughts like these are far more reminiscent of those early days after abandonment, filled with hard lessons and countless betrayals, and she likes to think most days that she's grown beyond that mistrustful little girl now that she has allies behind her and one of the hardest lessons of all marked on her shoulder.

This isn't like her. Not now.

With a sudden chill, she glances up at the sky again. _Is it darker than it was a moment ago? Oh, I don't like this in the least._

"Well, would you look at that," Hondo says, for all the world sounding like a casual onlooker as he follows her line of sight. "A storm! It never rains on this planet."

She rubs at her temples. Prior to this trip, she hadn't exactly expected it to be fun—it's realizing exactly how _un_fun it is going to be that drains her. "I have a bad feeling about this."

"Joy upon joy. I take what I said earlier back: you're clearly one of them. This is the sort of thing that only happens to Jedi." Having said that, Hondo doesn't appear to be all that bothered. There's a gleam of anticipation in his eyes. "Let's look for a high place, shall we? Lucky us, not having ventured too far. Perhaps the spaceport will yield a lift of some kind."

Rey frowns. "Last I checked, the proper course of action in a storm is to find shelter, not invite it to strike you down."

"Oh, we'll find shelter. But if we find a tower of some sort, we'll be able to see just how far the storm extends. Besides..." He stops and crosses his arms in thought.

Once again, she finds herself gritting her teeth when his silence stretches on. "Besides...?"

"You're not the only one who has a bad feeling about this. It's quiet, eh? Too quiet. One would think there might be at least something living here. Aside from the jungle."

They turn and start walking back the way they came. A cold wind, smelling of damp and mildew, winds through the lonely thoroughfare and rips a shudder out of her.

_How strange,_ Rey thinks. _That came from the direction of the city center._

* * *

Halfway back to the spaceport, she spots an unsealed building with what looks to be a wide staircase inside. The gloom is not encouraging, but it's the best bet they've seen yet. She jerks her chin in the direction of the building when Hondo looks in her direction. "Up there."

"Looks promising!"

"Maybe so." Rey detaches her staff from her back, slowly enough to show him she doesn't intend to use it on him, and proceeds forward with a cautious step. "You mentioned a temple when we first came here."

Hondo hums, keeping pace easily. "I did, yes."

"I'm guessing it's not within city limits..."

"Now, why would you say that?"

She gives him a flat look. "I saw the entire city as we landed. The central building is the only thing that looks like it could have been a temple once, and it doesn't have anything on the outside you'd expect to see on a temple. Like statues. Or fancy windows."

"A _cultured_ desert rat! Never thought I'd see the day." Hondo shrugs, one hand on his blaster, eyes roving from side to side. "There's a temple outside the city, I believe. Many temples. But the one I'm looking for is the largest. Easy to spot."

Which matches up with the information she'd gathered before coming here. Unless every single spacer she spoke with was lying to her, the temple's existence and location is all but confirmed—which is a spot of brightness, at least, since the closer they were getting to that citadel, the more she felt a chill somewhere deep in the spine of the earth here, reaching for her and circling around her.

She'll face her reckoning eventually, she knows. But not there. She has a feeling that its time has already passed.

They explore the building in tense silence. There is nothing about a graveyard, not really, just as there is nothing about a pile of sun-bleached bones stripped of fleshy material by steelpeckers, and more than ever, Rey wishes for company. Finn's is the safest, but she'd like to get to know Rose better—she has a feeling that Rose, who (from what little she's aware of) has a mind for systems and engineering, might take well to this kind of exploration. Their skills would even pair well together: Rey the mechanic, Rose the designer—

"Say, that lightsaber," Hondo says thoughtfully. "Looks almost familiar..."

Rey's hand rests gently on the pommel. "Does it?"

"Yes, yes, I'm quite certain of it." He ascends the last steps of the staircase they found in the central atrium; it tapers off into a narrow hallway, which fills her with unease, but without missing a beat he traipses off in that direction. "I didn't recognize it at first—you've had to repair it, I assume. I knew the man who wielded it before you."

"You knew Anakin Skywalker." Rey's brows raise. Coincidences she can take, but this is starting to go far beyond that.

Hondo smiles, lacing his fingers together behind his back as they walk; there's a hint of nostalgia somewhere deep in there. If she squints. Probably. "Hah, so you know his name? Never knew a more troublesome bastard! Why, he took down several of my operations with just himself and his Padawan. You could almost say he was, hm, hellbent on justice. Difficult thing in the Clone Wars. Never saw the point, myself. When the galaxy is in chaos, what good is it to try to help others? No, you've got to help yourself. Maybe help others if it can't be avoided."

"Maybe that was why," she says, quietly. "He wanted to make things right in a galaxy at war. Maybe he saw value in being so dedicated because there was so much wrong happening."

"You speak of right and wrong, but from where I stand, you know, the Jedi were perched on a very steep precipice. They lived in their Temple and kept to themselves, save for when they were called to stick their nose into the Republic's business—and, often, the business of people like me, trying to make a living." (Rey very carefully does not snort at the optimistic spin Hondo puts on this.) "Who were they, to make those sorts of judgments? Justice varies from place to place, and the Outer Rim's justice worked well enough for us before the Republic took an interest in our untapped resources."

Rey stops near one of the windows. The storm is gathering outside. From what she can see the floor they're on is somewhere near the midpoint of the building; shorter buildings stick out like thumbs below, while others tower even higher, reaching for the skies. At this angle their hooked tips look almost like fingernails.

"You're an opportunistic vulture," she says with no heat in it. It's more like a fact: the sky on Jakku is blue, there will never be a shortage of hothead starpilots waiting to make their mark, stormtroopers are unlikely to hit their targets, Hondo Ohnaka will never stop running rackets and schemes so long as he breathes.

In some respects, she's a vulture too. There's a part of her that's always calculating and analyzing, dissembling machinery in her mind and cataloguing how many portions it would get her on a good day. And a bad day. And the worst days, because those always need accounting for—

"Guilty as charged," Hondo says readily.

It takes a moment to gather her thoughts, seeing as she's splitting her attention three ways between keeping track of Hondo, watching their surroundings, and actually thinking on his words. "I met Luke Skywalker some months ago."

"Ah, the young stripling. Caused a large stir when he went missing... I admire style, I must admit."

"He was quite old," she corrects, tapping her staff on the ground. "Very grumpy. He said something—related to that, I suppose. They lost sight of what was important, and in the process, they lost themselves."

"Sounds exactly like the kind of spiritual bunk a Jedi would say. If you ask me, and I _do _ask me, well. You run a protection racket, it catches up with you when you aren't smart about it. The Jedi? Not all that smart." Hondo takes a left; Rey keeps pace, uncomfortable in the damp chill that the broken windows do nothing to keep out. This building is fairly inoffensive, but she hasn't forgotten that yawning presence that had made contact with her before landing; she glares at the closed doors and dead lights, mentally daring something to come for her. She has faced greater corpses than this.

"It looks like the roof ought to be accessible from here." Still thinking on the matter of Anakin Skywalker and what little she knows of him, she takes stock of the great big hole in the roof and prepares to sling her climbing hook. She pauses. "Do you have a cable hook?"

He shakes his head. "I have no need of such things. But alas—if I must climb, I must climb. Leave the hook and I'll manage."

"Alright, then," she says, somewhat dubious about the matter. Slinging the hook is a matter of a few seconds and a concentrated leap upwards; they've gotten lucky, with the hole being joined up to the edge of the interior wall, and Rey manages to gather enough momentum to make it up and out without having to try a second time.

The air is different up here. She notices it almost immediately—the breeze is stronger and chillier, approaching the levels of the constant chill on Ahch-To.

Which leads her to thoughts of Luke, his tragedy and his mistakes, which further leads to the unmentionable. It's easier, pretending. If she didn't acknowledge it was there, she didn't have to deal with it.

This dark energy reminds her not of Kylo Ren, whose signature, to her, has always been cloaked in shadow. Shadow is different from darkness—shadow is concealment, darkness is open. Extant. It makes no bones about what it is and what it is not. Cultivates its image, yes, but rarely does it flat-out lie. It knows that the most effective forms of untruth rest in kernels of truth.

Kylo Ren has not been honest with himself a single day in his life.

No, what rests on Dromund Kaas is closer to what she recalls of Snoke's presence. Cruel and taunting. Intent on malice.

They have no friends here. Not that there's anything alive in the city... she hopes.

Stretching out with her senses reveals nothing but the jungle behind them. This is not a comfort, but for now, there's nothing to be done but trust what she's being told. Rey gets the feeling that she needs to be careful here when she uses the Force. That sleeping presence is aware of her, yawning and ponderous and very possibly planet-sized, and agitating it—stirring it—seems to her like a very unwise idea. If she can possibly avoid it, her search for the relics the ancient texts described will go far easier.

With almost no warning, the world goes silent.

Rey takes in a sharp breath. "Not now," she whispers, too aware of her shoulders stiffening, her fingers curling into fists.

Behind her, silence.

Then: the sound of a helmet modulating heavy breathing, the explosive burst of agony behind tightly-wound shields that are as nothing to her. Her fingers are shaking, even balled into fists, and she stares into the distance with a set jaw and hard eyes.

She can't deal with this right now. And by the feel of him, neither can he.

"...Scavenger," Kylo Ren says, voice electronic and flat. Tears spring to her eyes.

_You, you, you,_ her mind cries, thoughts awhirl with all kinds of things to hurl at him, all kinds of ways to make him hurt more than he already is. She knows now that she couldn't have done it, couldn't have done anything he wasn't willing to do himself, but— _You promised me, you left me, you lied—_

It still hurts.

He pauses. She hears movement, the rustling of his tunic shifting against his battle overcoat. "Where... are you?"

"Nowhere." The desire to wrap her arms around herself is strong. There is nothing worse than the cold. Jakku's nights had never been her favorite, and they got even worse after the last time someone broke into her shelter and stole the pile of ruined tarps and market draperies she'd been able to haggle for in Niima when Plutt was away.

"An abandoned city," he muses, and wherever he is, his boots don't clank against the floor. "You're scavenging for something. Allies, perhaps, in your fight against me."

Rey snorts out of anger. "Maybe so."

"No. Something different, then." His mind reaches for hers and she wrenches her shields up, pressing back against him. He walks toward her and she takes several steps closer to the edge of the roof. "Where are you? Tell me."

"Why should I?" she bites out.

Kylo draws back. "...Resisting is futile. It will only bring you to ruin. Admit the truth and end this farce—the longer you go on, the less merciful the First Order will be."

"Mercy," she whispers. "Last I checked, the First Order wasn't known for being merciful in the least. People who build planet-killers don't exactly have the best interests of people in mind. I saw the destruction of Hosnian Prime with my own eyes. Or did you forget what your people did?"

"The First Order is under new leadership." His voice is hard, even through the helmet, and he sounds disdainful. "Such unnecessary sacrifices are no longer permitted under my jurisdiction. We will transform the galaxy into a place ruled by order—one where people no longer suffer under the systems of chaos that have thrown thousands of star systems into war and destruction. There will be no more poverty, no more slavery—"

"_Listen_ to yourself! Do you think it's that easy to change a system?" Rey hisses, spinning around and stalking toward him in her anger. "You crush the galaxy under your fist and they submit, just like that? You make them suffer so you can make their lives better? What kind of peace is that?"

"A peace like the Empire—"

"I lived in the ashes of the Empire's peace," she says bitterly. "I've learnt its history. Its peace was bought with the blood of countless sentients, the suffering of billions. The freedom of the Empire was an _illusion—"_

His hands are on her arms. His helmet is in her face. She would bite him if not for that. "Tell me more of how much you know about the galaxy," he sneers. "You, never left Jakku, a scavenger—"

"My scavenging yielded documents and journals and letters. First-hand accounts like the ones that led me here," she snarls, tempted to try and bite him anyways. _Bastard._

"Oh, so you can read?"

That does it. Rey makes a noise that sounds less human and more feral; she seizes his collar with both hands and shakes him, regretting only that he's too gigantic a man to be lifted in the air, and prepares to use his ungainly helmet to knock his lights out. The roof cracks beneath her feet with the force of her rage. His hands tighten on her arms, trying to use his strength to get her off.

Thunder rumbles in the distance, dark and powerful; it rattles her bones and freezes her to the spot. Slowly, she turns her head in the direction it came from.

Several klicks out from the outskirts of the city, nestled deep in a valley at the end of an overgrown mountain pass, is an ancient temple with brutal hooked outcroppings and a tall obelisk that soars over its entrance. The sky above it is full of clouds, swirling and angry, but what makes Rey's blood run cold are the eyes. They sit squarely in the middle of the gathering storm, great and terrible, made of lightning and shadows, and they're looking right at her.

_So much for not waking the beast,_ she thinks, mouth dry.

"What have you done?" Kylo asks, following her line of sight. He does a funny thing then, looking away and then back at the temple very sharply, as if he can't quite believe what his viewport is showing him. "You... what are you doing on _Dromund Kaas?"_

Rey swallows. She can't answer him.

"Rey—"

The sound of the wind rushes back into her ears, no longer muted and distant. Rey's hands are empty. Kylo is gone.

Feeling shaky, she looks at her hands as if she's never seen them before.

_Remember the texts,_ she tells herself. _Remember why you're here. Keep your guard up. This is what the Dark does to you—feeds on your anger, your bitterness. _

"Hah! The great Hondo still has it," Hondo declares behind her, followed by a grunt of exertion as he pulls himself up onto the roof. "Hmm. More dilapidated than I expected. No matter—see that temple to the west, young Jedi? That's our target. It's only been breached once before. Has all the treasure you could imagine! Artefacts, relics, crystals—not kyber, though, I'm afraid, but still worth a penny, and a penny earned is good by me. Your search for a holocron... hmm, difficult, but if anywhere will have one, that temple will."

She turns. "How do you know what I'm looking for?"

"The great Hondo has his sources."

Rey glares.

Hondo smiles. It isn't a friendly smile. "I happened to catch a glimpse of your datapad back on the ship. Now, as you can see, our route is clear—we'll follow the road out west. Keeping to the main streets ought to be the easiest way. Shall we be going? There's no time to waste."

"Keep your hat on," she mutters, following him back down the hole. Just before jumping down, she glances back at the temple.

The eyes are still there.

Why didn't Hondo say anything? Surely those can't be normal. He's seen a lot in his time, but to be completely unflappable...?

"We don't have all day, girl!" he calls. "Are you a Jedi or aren't you?"

Rey scowls. "I'm coming. Just let me get my hook cable first."


	3. Chapter 3

It only takes seconds for Kylo Ren to decide what to do when the Force retreats and the eerie silence of Malachor's dead surface returns to him.

First he breathes in. Not something he's used to, but the absurdity of Rey's situation damn near requires it.

Then he forcibly shoves aside the bulwark of rage within him and thinks. Over the past several months, he's had one of his Knights keep tabs on the scavenger; the last hope of the galaxy, its last Jedi, is no small threat, even if she mostly seems interested in running low-priority errands for the Resistance for some odd reason. Dromund Kaas is not that far from Malachor. Dromund Kaas has a known cache of ancient relics, untouched by the usual looters and spacers out of fear of the planet, and First Order intelligence has always had reason to believe that there may be one or more holocrons somewhere there—what little remains of its ancient history has indicated as much, marking it as a former center of the mythical Sith Empire.

The Sith Empire, as far as he knows, had prioritized knowledge over all else. No knowledge had been more valuable than that which was Force-related. When the Emperor established the Galactic Empire in the wake of the Grand Republic, most records of his predecessors disappeared from the wider galaxy. A curious action for such an established Sith Lord. Kylo supposes he must've been fairly intent on knowledge himself.

In another time, another life, a boy who bore a different name had fallen into a hole in the ground while adventuring with his uncle on Ch'hodos, and together they had discovered an ancient temple that escaped the Emperor's long reach. They brought its records and its ancient technology back home with them, translated them and stored them in far more up-to-date archives that would stand the test of time, and the uncle used it as a lesson to teach his nephew about the dangers of seeking power under the guise of knowledge.

"_We'll keep the information about the caches. The holocrons could be important someday. But you and I have another path to walk, Ben. We do not seek knowledge for its own sake—we seek it to piece the broken parts of the past back together, in order that we might not repeat it."_

Forever lecturing. Forever half-lost in another world. Forever watching him out of the corners of his eyes.

Luke Skywalker was afraid, even then. But his sister had been proud of her boy when she heard the news a standard month later. She came to visit for the first time in a year, spent half her time listening to Luke, and spent the other half working on policy to provide the New Republic with functional trade routes throughout the Core.

Leia Organa may have been forever distracted where he was concerned, but she wouldn't be one to forget such information.

With the state of the galaxy being as it is...

Kylo sighs. It escapes his helmet as an electronic hiss. "She's looking for holocrons."

_We are not finished here, _he promises the dead wastes beneath his feet. _You and I have more to do._

He looks over the rippled ground for another moment, some vain hope that he might find what he's looking for here lingering somewhere beneath his chest, but the Force is still and silent. Even the echoes of Malachor's dark past are quiet today. When his examination yields nothing of note, Kylo turns and strides toward his ship.

Rey is playing with fire. A beacon of Light plunging herself into the Darkness? It won't be able to resist.

Stubbornly, he tells himself that the roiling storm in his veins is anticipation, is readiness, is elation at the opportunity to finally do something about the Jedi-shaped thorn in his side. It certainly isn't fear at what the Darkness will do to her, tinged with the cruel memory of Snoke's glee as he caught her in his trap, and it isn't the numb panic he feels daily as his life continually winds its way down a path he had never once imagined for himself.

No, the Supreme Leader of the First Order, Master of the Knights of Ren, is not one to feel fear. He will not be as his predecessors were.

Not at all.

* * *

The moment his Upsilon-class command shuttle crowns the atmosphere of Dromund Kaas, Kylo is buffeted by a wave of Darkness that has him sitting up straighter in his seat. It creeps through the ship, curling about it almost lovingly, seeking purchase in the shadowed places of his corrupted heart and the soft bits within. He knows better than to be fooled: even something like him, well-versed in its ways, is far from immune to the things it whispers of while his navcomp screen shudders and his paneled cockpit lighting flickers.

Before Starkiller, he might've thrown himself into it, unthinking in his relief that it was finally calling to him. That it wouldn't take Snoke's painful instruction to draw it to his innermost being.

Now there is Rey. Kylo flexes his fingers, considers the merits of calling for backup, and switches off the location trackers that would transmit his coordinates to the Finalizer.

He'll just tell Hux that he was carrying out one of Snoke's final orders to him—tying up loose ends in secret, Supreme Leader to Supreme Leader. _Force-related business. Really, General, you wouldn't understand._

Amusement bubbles up from deep within. The look on Hux's face will be priceless.

But first, he has to get there, get Rey, and get out.

Kylo keeps most of his attention trained on skimming over the tall mountains and jungle valleys that make up this side of Dromund Kaas. The rest of it he apportions to spreading his senses out in an effort to locate Rey. It's harder than it ought to be. The Darkness acts as a muffling blanket, spread across the planetary surface like leather in the process of being tanned—it makes pinpointing her exact location impossible, even though he can tell that she's here somewhere.

Unfortunately for him, the sparse daylight that filters through the clouds is quickly fading into twilight. He needs to land before he's forced to waste fuel for an entire night.

"There," he mumbles to himself, spotting a rough plateau overlooking a deep valley. There's a wide path leading up to it, which isn't ideal, but his ship is well-equipped to fend off any local wildlife that might have designs on it. Steering toward it is a matter of tightening his grip on the controls, pulling a few levers, and pressing a few buttons; the ease and the simplicity of the action does nothing for the disquiet that has set into him at just how intent Dromund Kaas's presence is.

The look in Rey's eyes hadn't escaped him when she lifted him in the air. He is familiar with anger, the color and the shape of it, and she had been angry, sure, but there was something else lurking behind that furious expression that he had only ever seen in those moments in the snow on Starkiller Base. Just before the earth split open and tore them apart.

Not fear. Not the look from the forest.

It was half-wild intent, rage fueled by survival instinct, and...

Kylo swallows. Perhaps he will consider that later.

At any rate, there's not much to be done for now. Nightfall comes quickly and leaves his viewport draped in black velvet. The more he stares out into it, the more unsettled he feels; there is a difference between knowing that the night cannot harm you and believing it, and the boy he had once been is gone, but fragments of him still linger on.

Ben Solo kept himself up late for far too many nights spent watching the darkness, waiting for monsters to step out of the shadows. Kylo Ren turns away from the viewport and heads toward his quarters.

The back of his neck prickles with the force of some unseen attention. He decides not to glance back at the cockpit and especially not to try peering through the viewport again.

Not until morning. He knows better.


End file.
